Images

Eberswalde Crater, a Finalist Not Selected as Landing Site for Curiosity

An area inside Eberswalde crater was considered as a landing site for NASA's Mars Science Laboratory mission. If Eberswalde had been selected, rather than Gale crater, the mission's rover, Curiosity, would have been sent to land on the crater floor and probe an ancient river bed, and possible ancient lake bed, on the way to a large delta on the western wall of the crater.

The left panel shows the regional context of the Eberswalde target landing ellipse with colors representing the elevation of the surface features (purple lowest and red highest). The yellow box indicates the location of the feature shown in the center panel. The white box indicates the location of the feature shown in the right panel. The scale bars in each panel indicate distance in kilometers.

The middle panel shows an example of a high priority science target for exploration near the ellipse, and the right column shows science targets within the ellipse. Eberswalde and each of the three other finalist landing sites display a variety of very interesting targets for exploration within and outside of the proposed landing ellipse.

The images in the middle and right panels are from the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment camera on NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. The University of Arizona, Tucson, operates the High Resolution Science Imaging Experiment. NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., manages the Mars Science Laboratory and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter missions for NASA's Science Mission Directorate.